Webinar Q&A: Why Connected TV is the New Normal

A few weeks ago, I hosted an Adweek webinar on Why Connected TV is the New Normal with Doug Fleming, Head of Advanced TV at Hulu, and Lucas Krump, VP of Global DSP Partnerships at Freewheel. We received some great questions about how to best leverage CTV that we didn’t have the time to address live. So we pulled together the top five most commonly asked questions to answer here.

Q: With connected TV, measurement can be very different from traditional TV. How can advertisers measure and attribute success in their CTV campaigns?

A:Lucas Krump, Freewheel: While the delivery method and targeting capabilities of CTV are akin to digital, the consumer’s viewing experience is virtually the same as television. How you measure CTV will ultimately depend on your campaign goals – the advertiser must determine the metric that matters most. If you’re a brand that traditionally invests in TV, you can track TV-like metrics such as GRPs, reach, and frequency. If you are looking for more holistic digital reporting, you can analyze things like impression delivery and completion rate.

Q: Would you recommend that advertisers budget for programmatic when structuring an upfront in 2019?

A:Doug Fleming, Hulu: As connected TV audiences continue to grow, it’s important that advertisers set aside a portion of their upfront budget to spend programmatically. While the exact percentage of budget will vary from brand to brand, the value from spending programmatically is clear. With the digital data available in the programmatic ecosystem, advertisers have the insights available to create relevant digital marketing campaigns that engage audiences across screens.

Q: As audiences continue to shift toward connected TV options, how should advertisers balance their connected TV strategies with their traditional ones?

A: Lucas Krump, Freewheel:TV is still the best way to build your brand and reach engaged audiences at scale. As consumers fragment, however, it’s critical for marketers to complement traditional buys with connected ones. We’ve seen CTV can be an effective tool for driving incremental reach, as well as help brands balance the frequency of TV viewers’ exposure. Unfortunately, there is no “one-size-fits-all” magic number for testing or allocating budget to your CTV campaign. Some brands choose a “crawl, walk, run” approach while others earmark budgets up front as they would for any other media channel or partner.

Q: What are some of the connected TV best practices for media buying and creative input?

A:Doug Fleming, Hulu: Remember that “programmatic” is a buying tactic, not a strategy. Programmatic buys, especially in a connected TV landscape, should ladder up your overarching strategy. Programmatic in CTV is, at its core, about data and automation. Both buyers and publishers should consider the data sets they can access and how that data can be applied to increase relevancy and evolve formats to improve the advertising experience.

Q: What do I need to get started with connected TV?

A: Tim Sims, The Trade Desk: When getting started with CTV, it’s important to realize that it should be treated just like any other digital buy – the key difference being that it appears on a larger screen and only offers premium inventory. Additionally, since CTV fits into the overall internet-device ecosystem, it’s important to work with a buying platform that has multichannel capabilities across all those screens. While CTV can be used initially for top-of-funnel brand awareness campaigns, it should also be used for lower-funnel, more direct-response retargeting efforts across other connected devices.

For more information on creating and measuring engaging CTV campaigns, check out our guide here.